Italian High Renaissance Painter, ca.1430-1516 (b ?1431-6; d Venice, 29 Nov 1516). Painter and draughtsman, son of (1) Jacopo Bellini. Although the professional needs of his family background may have encouraged him to specialize at an early date in devotional painting, by the 1480s he had become a leading master in all types of painting practised in 15th-century Venice. Later, towards the end of his long life, he added the new genres of mythological painting and secular allegory to his repertory of subject-matter. His increasing dominance of Venetian art led to an enormous expansion of his workshop after c. 1490; and this provided the training-ground not only for his numerous shop-hands and imitators (generically known as Belliniani) but probably also for a number of major Venetian painters of the next generation. Throughout his career, Giovanni showed an extraordinary capacity for absorbing a wide range of artistic influences, both from within Venetian tradition and from outside. He also oversaw a technical revolution in the art of painting, involving the gradual abandonment of the traditional Italian use of egg tempera in favour of the technique of oil painting pioneered in the Netherlands. It was thanks to Giovanni Bellini that the Venetian school of painting was transformed during the later 15th century from one mainly of local significance to one with an international reputation. He thus set the stage for the triumphs of Venetian painting in the 16th century and for the central contribution that Venice was to make to the history of European art.  Related Paintings of Giovanni Bellini :. | Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror | den tornekronte kristus | Le Comte Robert de Montesquiou (mk20) | The Doge Barbarigo, St John and Musician Angels (Detail) | San Zaccaria Altarpiece |
Related Artists:
Jean de Beaumetz
Artois,active from 1361-Dijon 1396
BRIL, Paul
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, ca.1554-1626 Painter, printmaker and draughtsman, brother of Matthijs Bril. According to van Mander, Paul studied in Antwerp with Damiaan Wortelmans (1545-after 1588/9) before travelling to Rome, via Lyon, c. 1574, to join his brother, whom, according to Baglione, he assisted on Vatican commissions after 1576. However, no document places Paul in Rome before 1582, and in any case Matthijs was probably not there until c. 1575. Paul's first known independent works are monumental frescoes dating from the late 1580s. They include a dramatic rendering of Jonah and the Whale (1588) in the Scala Santa in the Vatican (based on a drawing by Matthijs; Paris, Louvre) and a series of landscape lunettes (c. 1589) in the Lateran Palace.
John Morgan
British 1823-1886